Probably the most important thing I did in this show was get people to fill out a questionnaire about the word all. It starts off fairly innocently and then goes off the deep end a bit. I think my final piece is most likely to be a honed down version of this questionnaire. A few people said they really enjoyed filling it out and a couple even said they’d been thinking about it in the week after doing it. That has to be a good thing. It’s a good way of engaging people with a thought process.

I feel a little bit like the questionnaire speaks for itself so won’t blog that much about it for now. If you haven’t already, I’d be delighted if you’d download it, fill it out and e-mail it to me at dan@hammerheadrabbits.com. Or post/give it to me, if you have my address or see me reasonably frequently. (The hand written thing is nice with these questionnaires).

One thing I liked about the questionnaire was the fact that people could read all the other answers. There’s something quite immersive about that, though I’m not sure why. I think people just can’t help but be nosy. Perhaps it’s similar to why these questionnaires are so popular in Cosmopolitan and all those other women’s magazines. I get the feeling there’s a tendency with those questionnaires to (want to) think that they somehow have the key to the pain and/or drabness at the heart of our existence. Whereas in fact they’re probably written over a coronation chicken sandwich at lunch by a couple of bored journalists. I reckon people are very good at wanting the key to unlock and stop the general rubbishness of life. Poor us. We’d surely be a lot better off if we didn’t bother. Not that I think any of this is that relevant to my questionnaire, but I do want to give it a little context. Anyway, I’m ranting again. Please accept my apologies.

I do think I need to break the questions down a bit, looking at how each one leads to the next and figure out the best ways of taking people from one part of the subject to the other. So longer posts about this are possibly in the offing.

At the moment, I do think the questionnaire will form the basis of the final piece. People have really seemed to enjoy filling it out on the whole. I love the idea that people can be involved in the way a piece of work turns out, that they’re involved in the project.

Probably one of the main things I need to think about here is how to deal with the unlikely event of the work being sold. If filled out questionnaires are a part of the finished piece, do I have the right to sell their answers? Perhaps the whole thing should be under creative commons. So any answers people give would be part of that contract. Would I then be able to sell the work, though? I need to do a bit of investigation into the hows and whys of creative commons partnership, I think.

PS – Just looked at the questionnaire in open office and the formatting is slightly off. It’s not totally skew whiff though. Anyways, if you use open office, the questionnaire usually fills two whole sides. Ach.